Business

'Woman in Black' will get in your head

By Rhema Zlaten

For A&E Spotlight

Posted:
05/22/2014 01:41:22 PM MDT

Charlie Ferrie, left, and Nick Holland star in "The Woman in Black," opening Thursday at Bas Bleu Theatre in Fort Collins. The story is told in shadow and darkness to highlight its terror. (Jay Benedict Brown / Special to A&E Spotlight)

Solicitor Arthur Kipps receives a business assignment to care for the affairs of the recently deceased Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. When Kipps arrives at the faraway English town of Crythin Gifford, he quickly realizes the estate is haunted with tragic secrets and ghosts who will not let go of the past.

That's a quick synopsis of "The Woman in Black," a chilling tale of tragedy and mystery, which opens Thursday at the Bas Bleu stage in Fort Collins.

Using the power of imagination, two actors will transform a bare stage into this immersive story. The original book, "The Woman in Black" by Susan Hill, depends on the gothic traditions of describing the setting of a story to spin the creepy tragedy, and the stage version utilizes the same tactics.

Nick Holland, of Fort Collins, who plays Kipps, described how audiences will experience this story:

"These two guys on stage together, they really build a little world for themselves. The audience gets brought into it, as well. Old characters at various points in time say things about entering a new dimension or realms of consciousness.

"The script uses the gothic storytelling that has all of this beautiful descriptive language and then we have a sparse set, so it lets the language stands out and it puts a lot of weight onto the audience and the two guys and everyone's imagination."

The stage version of "The Woman in Black" will follow classic horror movie tactics of placing the audience's mind in a first-person experience.

"If you want to make anything having to do with horror, you need to make the audience's experience simultaneous with the character's experience," Holland said. "So there is a lot of work to make the character seem very human and a full, fleshed-out character. It has the classic horror movie vibe of the audience wanting to say 'No, no! Don't open that door!'

"We vicariously watch the character make decisions that we hope we wouldn't make, but we probably would make in those situations."

Director Judd Farner, a theater education student at Colorado State University, wanted to play with space and classic gothic storytelling tactics such as complete honesty of emotion and isolation.

"We are giving everything away," Farner said. "In gothic storytelling there is a lot about characters feeling isolated and alone. It will be potent to have an audience watching and also feeling alone. What a lot of gothic stories do is they place the character away from everything. Kipps is away from London first and then goes to a tiny town. Then he goes to the house all by himself. We continue to make him feel more and more alone. You go into it wanting to be part of this guy and wanting to feel the part of the story. At the end, you feel as alone as he does."

The lighting designer has attended nearly all rehearsals, a role in this production that's just as important as the actors.

"The lighting has also been this other kind of beast," Farner said. "We open the show in full lights (the audience even sits in the light), and then we have to figure out the isolation factor. So those technical elements are surprisingly complex. So the hardest thing to do is to make it feel simple. We have been watching a lot of horror stories.

"With a movie, you still feel in control. There is a movie screen. When it is live, you are not quite sure where the boundary stops."

Another classic gothic storytelling element used in the show is the power of nature to manipulate emotions.

"(The house) is out on the marsh," Farner said. "Those natural elements can tend to feel far more supernatural just because you can't control them. So Kipps gets stuck at the house once because of the mist rolling in. Is it Mother Nature controlling it, or the woman in black? It is simple things that when spoken about in a certain way feel very complex. That has been one of the tricks.

"So keep it simple and sometimes that imagination will just run wild."